My Introduction to Scuba Diving

Over twenty years ago I decided to become a scuba instructor.  Like everything I end up loving, I was terrible at scuba diving at first.  I was so clueless.  There I was sitting at the bottom of a murky lake shivering and freezing my buns off in a 3mm wetsuit in April waiting for a herd of other students to complete the required  underwater skills.  The water was in the 50s and the dive shop owner was wearing a dry suit.  He was toasty warm and dry, while we open water diver candidates and his instructor pawns shivered in the frigid water.  The instructors wore special dive parkas and heated water on a propane stove to pour it into their wetsuits while we students just looked on.  We had no clue just how fast that water was going to strip us of our warmth because we were new to diving.  It was a miserable ordeal, but I still loved it.  It is a wonder that I still love diving so much after such a poor introduction to the sport.  Perhaps that is why I decided to finally fulfill my dream and become and independent instructor many years later.  I know that learning to scuba dive can and should be much better than that.  Now that I am teaching scuba and learning the secrets of the scuba business, I understand why the experience was so bad.  It came down to self-centered greed on the part of the dive shop owner (now long gone).  He knew the lake was too cold and that we would be down there a long time waiting for the herd of people to do their required skills.  Of course he knew, he brought a $2000 drysuit along!  What a jerk!  He made a business decision to take us to that miserably cold lake anyway, and laughed to himself that we were too "cheap" to fly to the Caribbean to do our open water dives. I have even heard of dive chop owners letting students choose inadequate exposure protection so they can later sell a wetsuit or dry suit to those customers.  Sadly, this is still happening and I hear about bad experiences all the time. Choose a real professional dive instructor that has a reputation to uphold, not a random person assigned to you by a dive store.  Ask the instructor directly, what the course will be like. Do consider paying extra to complete your dives in warm tropical waters, and be sure to ask how many students will be in the course, the conditions for the open water dives and much more.  Speak directly to your instructor, not a dive shop salesperson.